Poverty hurts children and our nation’s future. This stark statement is backed by years of scientific research and the more we learn about the brain and its development the more devastatingly true we know this to be. Childhood poverty can and does scar children for life. Yet in the largest economy on earth we stand by as 14.7 million languish in poverty. Here’s a snapshot of who our poor children are today:

Every other baby is a child of color. And 1 in 2 Black babies is poor – the poorest child in America.

1 in 3 Hispanic children under 5 is poor during their years of rapid brain development.

More than 1 in 4 urban children and nearly 1 in 4 rural children is poor.

1 in 5 of all children in America is poor—14.7 million children.

1 in 6 Black children is extremely poor living on less than $8 a day.

1 in 7 Hispanic children under five is extremely poor.

1 in 8 Hispanic children is poor.

Less than 1 in 9 White children is poor; 4.1 million children.

A child of color is more than twice as likely to be poor as a White child. Of the 14.7 million children living beneath the poverty line in 2013, defined as a family of four living on less than $23,834 a year, or $16.25 a person a day, over 40 percent lived in extreme poverty on less than $11,917 a year, half the poverty line – barely $8 a person a day.

The 14.7 million poor children in America exceeds the populations of 12 U.S. states combined: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming and is greater than the populations of Sweden and Costa Rica combined.

Our nearly 6.5 million extremely poor children exceeds the combined populations of Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming and is greater than the populations of Denmark or Finland.

It is a national disgrace that so many poor children live in the United States of America –the world’s richest economy. It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s costly. And it’s the greatest threat to our future national, economic and military security.

The Children’s Defense Fund has just released a groundbreaking report called Ending Child Poverty Nowshowing for the first time how America could end child poverty, as defined by the Supplemental Poverty measure, for 60 percent of all poor children and 72 percent of all poor Black children. We can make this happen by investing another 2 percent of the federal budget to improve existing programs and policies that increase parental employment, make work pay and ensure children’s basic needs are met. Poverty for children under 3 and children in single parent households would drop 64 percent and 97 percent of all poor children would experience improvements in their economic circumstances.

CDF contracted with the non-partisan, independent Urban Institute to generate real numbers on the costs to implement improvements to existing policies and programs and the number of children who would benefit. CDF’s report shows how relatively modest changes in policies we know work can be combined to significantly reduce child poverty, and implemented right now if our political leaders put common good, common sense and economic sense for children first to improve the lives and futures of millions of children, and save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

CDF’s report estimates a cost of $77.2 billion a year for the combined proposed policy improvements and suggests multiple tradeoffs our country can make to pay for this huge, long overdue and urgently needed reduction in child poverty without raising the federal deficit including:

Closing tax loopholes that let U.S. corporations avoid $90 billion annually in federal income taxes by shifting profits to subsidiaries in foreign tax havens; or

Eliminating tax breaks for the wealthy by taxing capital gains and dividends at the same rate as wages, saving more than $84 billion a year; or

Scrapping the F-35 fighter jet program already several years behind schedule and 68 percent over budget and still not producing fully functioning planes. For the $1.5 trillion projected costs of this program, the nation could reduce child poverty 60 percent for 19 years, potentially breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

Download CDF’s new report and share it widely with your child advocacy networks and faith communities to learn changes that can be made at the national, state and local levels. Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, it’s time for all Americans to work together to finish the job beginning with ending child poverty in our nation with the largest economy on earth.

It was 50 years ago this month that President Lyndon Johnson launched America's War on Poverty in his State of the Union message, but U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore of Milwaukee says the War on Poverty has somehow become a war on the poor. She cites attacks on the very programs that were at the heart of the War on Poverty. "These programs that take care of the very disabled and elderly, Pell Grants - you know, that's being regarded as a welfare program," she points out. "There's a war on any program that seeks to help people get out of poverty and move into the middle class." Moore adds she is one of millions of Americans who have used these programs over the past five decades, to help escape poverty and move into the middle class.

But now, she says the middle class is in danger and needs to wake up and fight to keep these programs. "But I think once we get middle-class, working-class people to realize that they're falling very quickly into the ranks of the poor, we can develop some more empathy for stuff like making sure we maintain Social Security benefits" she stresses. Moore says perceptions and politics have changed in the past 50 years, and she sees the congressional wrangling over extending federal unemployment benefits as an example. She points out that in past times of high unemployment, federal benefits were extended, during periods of both Republican and Democratic leadership.

Now, she says, some members of Congress say the unemployed are just lazy, raising the question of whether the nation needs a new version of LBJ's War on Poverty. "Well, we might want to call it something else," Moore says. "You know, there is a lot of rhetoric about helping people out of poverty. "But if we were to do that, it would be a focus on those initiatives that have actually demonstrated their ability to help people get out of poverty."

American president Lyndon B Johnson signs the war on poverty bill during a ceremony outdoors at the White House Rose Garden, Washington, DC. (Photo by Arnold Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)

Opinion

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s iconic War on Poverty. Sadly, half a century later, a new war is needed more than ever. America can point to the legacy of that ambitious program—with all its successes and failures— even as the country today is apparently losing that war.

On January 8, 1964 in his State of the Union address, President Johnson took the first step of tackling the ever present national problem of poverty in the United States. At that time, as the President noted, one in every five families earned incomes too small to meet their basic needs. And he seemed to realize the impact that poverty had on the country as a whole.

“Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope — some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity,” Johnson said. “It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.”

President Johnson articulated his new initiative as a cooperative approach, a joint effort requiring national organization and support, with direction and support from the state and local level. His goal was to attack poverty wherever it existed, whether in cities or small towns, among blacks or whites or Native Americans on the reservations, sharecroppers or migrants workers, the young or the elderly.

Moreover, Johnson wanted to not only relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to prevent it as well.

“Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper — in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children,” President Johnson declared in his speech. And he identified the best weapons for attack, including better schools, health and homes, as well as better jobs opportunities and training to allow Americans to escape from their miserable condition.

Johnson’s War on Poverty consisted of a number of initiatives, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created local Community Action Agencies to serve the needs of low income people. The Act also established programs such as Head Start, a program promoting school readiness for young children, the Job Corps, which provided education and training to young people, and Volunteers In Service to America, or VISTA, a national service program to fight poverty.

Under the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the nation’s largest food program, the federal government provides currency-type benefits for food for needy people, while the states cover the cost of determining who is eligible and distributing the stamps. Further, the Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare and Medicaid, health insurance programs for the elderly and the poor, while the elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 became the largest form of federal aid to primary and secondary or K-12 schools.

Looking back at the broad, ambitious agenda set out by LBJ half a century ago, there is ample evidence that his efforts were a success for the most vulnerable in society. For example, according to the Census Bureau, the safety net kept 41 million people, including 9 million children out of poverty in 2012. Further, new research suggests the safety net created by the War on Poverty helped cut the poverty rate from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012. Further, 29 percent would be in poverty today without those programs. The study, however, suggests the economy has done little to better the lives of the most destitute, pointing to the need to make structural changes to the economy.

Despite its successes, Johnson’s War on Poverty was a victim of misplaced priorities. The war in Vietnam diverted resources from anti-poverty programs, as there simply was not enough money to pay for two wars. Martin Luther King understood this. “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,” Dr. King said. “So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.”

Unfortunately, over the years politicians have waged a war against anti-poverty programs and have scapegoated the poor themselves. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan—who had scored political points by conjuring up the image of the black “welfare queen” getting rich from government handouts—declared that poverty won and the war was over. Further, in August 1996 President Bill Clintonsaid that “Today, we are ending welfare as we know it” when he signed a bill ending the federal guarantee of cash assistance to the poor and turning over welfare to the states.

Now, welfare is known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF. Two-thirds of poor children received welfare in the mid-1990s. Today that number has fallen to 27 percent. What’s worse is that 6 million people have no other source of income other than food stamps. The U.S. safety net isfar less generous and less comprehensive than that of other nations and, as a result, America is not as effective at fighting poverty and inequality as it could. This is why poverty is higher in the U.S. than in other prosperous nations.

And poverty in America remains high—very high in fact, at 50 million people (including 13 million children) or 16 percent, the highest rate since President Johnson was in office. In 1964 the poverty rate was 19 percent, and in 1969 it had fallen to 12.1 percent. In addition, 100 million Americans, or 1 in 3, live at twice the poverty level, which is $23,000 for a family of four.

Fifty years after the War on Poverty, U.S. economic inequality is now the highest since 1928, thanks to policies that have redistributed income at the expense of the poor. In 1928, the top 1 percent of families made 23.9 percent of the income. In 1944, this fell to 11.3 percent, with the bottom 90 percent receiving 67.5 percent. In 2012, the top 1 percent claimed 22.5 percent, and the bottom 90 percent fell below 50 percent (49.6) for the first time in history.

Unfortunately, in post-recession America, the majority of new jobs are low paying, and wages have been stuck for the bottom half of workers since 1973. Further, 20.5 million people earn incomes below half the poverty line, a disturbing increase of 8 million since 2000. Union membership has steadily dropped over the years, and millennials are stuck in a low wage existence, shut out of the middle class with enormous student debt to pay off. However, a movement of low wage workers is calling for minimum wage hikes and calling out abusive employers, in the hopes of turning the tide of public opinion and changing socioeconomic policy.

The circumstances in which America finds itself cry out for a War on Poverty 2.0. Tackling endemic poverty and eradicating the structural inequities in society are necessary in order to allow the nation to live up to its full potential. People need a more effective safety net, and good jobs with a living wage. Is there enough political will to fight the war? Possibly, but ultimately, it will take a national movement and public pressure to make that happen.